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Snickers bicker feeds ad flap

By Thulasi SrikanthanStafF Reporter

Wed., Feb. 7, 2007

A Super Bowl commercial for Snickers candy bars that involves two burly men kissing met a quick demise yesterday when it was pulled it from the Snickers website and future American TV broadcast, the latest in a series of marketing campaigns gone awry.

While the buzz the Snickers ad generated cannot be denied, the campaign drew the ire of gay groups across the United States with its depictions of two auto mechanics attempting to remain "manly" by ripping off their chest hair. Related ads show them hitting each other and drinking oil and antifreeze in order to retain their manhood after accidentally touching lips while eating the same candy bar.

The commercial was not aired on Canadian TV.

Earlier this week, it was Turner Broadcasting and a New York marketing firm, Interference Inc., that had to shell out $2 million (U.S.) after a campaign for the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force resulted in bomb scares on highways and bridges that brought Boston to a crawl.

And in Los Angeles, federal prosecutors are considering suing Paramount Pictures for putting digital devices in Los Angeles Times newspaper racks last April to promote the Tom Cruise movie Mission: Impossible III. Some people thought the devices, which played the Mission: Impossible theme song when the newspaper box doors were opened, were real bombs.

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While these and other companies have come under attack for what appear to be marketing gaffes, others have lauded them for stunts that resulted in a spike in Web hits and massive media coverage.

Part of what is inspiring companies to push the boundaries is the intensely competitive environment that sees consumers bombarded with thousands of commercial messages every day, said Ashwin Jofhi, a marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business."One way of breaking through the clutter is by doing something different, crossing the line," he said.

But crossing the line often also comes with the price of offending some groups.

"It's always a risk when you are trying to deliberately shock people," said June Cotte, a business professor at University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business. "There is a risk you will go over the top."

That's what many gay rights groups believed Snickers did, especially when Snickers left comments from members of the Super Bowl teams reacting with disgust to the "kiss" on its website.

"That Snickers, Mars and the NFL would promote and endorse this kind of prejudice is simply inexcusable," said Neil G. Giuliano, president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

This type of risky campaign could lead to ill will towards Snickers and result in a big backlash, said Cotte. "It may cost them in the long run.

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"If the gay and lesbian protests continue and grow, Mars could seriously suffer an image problem, not to mention possible boycotts. The fact that they yanked the ads, but didn't apologize, will be even more aggravating to those groups."

But it doesn't seem like the apology will be coming anytime soon.

In a statement issued by Snickers parent company, Masterfoods, spokesperson Alice Nathanson said the company states its goal was to capture the attention of a core audience of potential Snickers eaters.

"Feedback from our target consumers has been positive," she wrote.

"We know that humour is highly subjective and understand that some people may have found the ad offensive – clearly that was not our intent ... Consequently, we do not plan to continue to air the ad on television or on our Snickers website."

Srinivas Sridharan, a marketing professor at the University of Western Ontario, said it was either ignorance or callousness that could have led to the campaign.

"They had to know this is a sensitive issue in mainstream culture," he said. "Advertising is not like a movie or sitcom in which directors take liberty in making fun of sensitive situations.

"It's unfair to just set a cat among pigeons and create instability."

If success is measured by getting a product talked about, Sridharan said, "certainly both things have one thing in common which is to elicited a huge response from a big section of the population."

As for the Turner incident, Cotte said the $2-million payout was probably worth immense amount of publicity that the company got for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force show.

"That bought them tremendous amount of publicity," she said. "That is definitely worth a payback."

And while people in Boston might hold it against the company, she says it might not be the case elsewhere where most people can laugh it off and say maybe the police overreacted.

But University of Toronto professor Garry Leonard says while the general rule of thumb is that there is no such thing as bad publicity, there are exceptions when civic and legal action is involved.

"It's very specific step over the line ... I can't see that as good publicity," he said.

An additional problem in this case is that the story of advertising has eclipsed the story of the product.

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